Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy — The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. — When Microsoft and Apple were founded. — As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup.

Ballmer: Windows 7 is Vista, just ‘a lot better’ — Windows 7 will be like Windows Vista , but more so, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday as he defended the first two years of Vista and claimed its successor will be a major release. — “[Windows 7], it's Windows Vista, a lot better …

FRIENDS OF THE BAND — ZUCKERBERG PONDERS FACEBOOK MUSIC BIZ — Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is plotting a possible push into the digital-music business in the wake of MySpace's launch of MySpace Music last month. — The surging social-networking giant is talking to a number …

Extended Gmail outage hits Apps admins — E-mail service expected to be down for 24 hours — IDG News Service) A prolonged, ongoing Gmail outage has some Google Apps administrators pulling their hair out as their end users, including high-ranking executives, complain loudly while they wait for service to be restored.

Vimeo Launches Vimeo Plus - Annual Paid Plans — NY-based video sharing service Vimeo has announced the launch of Vimeo Plus today. Vimeo Plus is a paid service that offers additional benefits over the free service. NewTeeVee has a good overview of all of the features of Vimeo Plus which include …

Benchmarking Flash Player 10 (Updated) — The web collectively got a bit shinier this week with Adobe's release of Flash Player 10. The new version offers designers a compelling set of new features including support for rich 3D visual effects, a new antialiasing engine, an improved drawing API …

Shazam comes out of the shadows — The British tech firm can thank Steve Jobs. Its music search is one of the most popular apps for Apple's iPhone. — NEW YORK (Fortune) — Have you ever been out with friends at a bar and heard one of those seventies songs like “Play That Funky Music …

Yahoo! gets local with SearchMonkey — Continuing to deliver on their aim of enriching the core search offering with a little help from SearchMonkey, Yahoo! yesterday announced that the existing SearchMonkey apps for CitySearch and Zagat are now available by default to all users of Yahoo! Search.

Adult Startup Zivity Cuts 1/3 Of Staff — Zivity, the adult social network and media site that describes itself as a “community-powered showcase of female beauty”, has laid off 1/3 of its staff, cutting back from 22 employees to 14. (Again, 1/3 seems to be the magic number …

Welcome to your new Home Page — Also available in: , Português, Deutsch, Español — We've rolled out the new Flickr Home Page to all of our members. Why the change? The layout, design and new features now surfaces much more of the action going on around you.

NVIDIA launches the Quadro CX GPU for graphic professionals — The latest from NVIDIA isn't designed with Crysis in mind, but rather graphic pros that rely heavily on Adobe Creative Suite 4 software. With an MSRP of $1,999, your Photoshop dabbling isn't the market NVIDIA is after here with this optimized card.

Qik taps the feature phone market — today announced that their live mobile video streaming product is coming to a feature phone near you. The Java ME-based application is available in alpha, allowing users with select Nokia and Sony Ericsson feature phones to record and stream video from wherever they are.

Discovery CEO: Web ‘Take-up Rate Is Not That Strong’ — Cable programmer Discovery (NSDQ: DISAB) is making its first foray in ad-supported, free-to-air TV on the UK's Freeview. (It's not free for Discovery, which is reported to be paying millions of pounds for the privilege.)

Resistance 2 beta begins... today! — Heya, it's been a while since I've been seen around these parts as James Stevenson, Bryan Intihar and the others at Insomniac have been doing most of the Resistance 2 posting as of late. Along with my return to the blog, I bring a few announcements with regards to R2: